I had that Zenith TV when I was a kid. Used it on cross country road trips. Loved tuning in various channels throughout the trip for 20 minutes at a time until we were out of range.
I think the backwards lettering is supposed to show affluence. His office is important enough to have a window in it. Subtle psychological adman game. It's got people taking a second look even to this day.
Not quite sure about your interpretation, but I believe that picture is supposed to resemble a storefront or agency, which is shown from the inside-out... Probably not much more to that.
The Sears Binoc/ Sanyo TPM 2570G apparently came with a pretty cool "binocular" case. As someone who is a bird watcher for a hobby, it really looks quite a lot like a binocular bag in size, shape, and even a little strap to carry it. Pretty neat.
It looks like some kind of Star Wars thing, not quite like the binoculars Luke uses but in that neighbourhood. Meanwhile the other, larger set that doesn't power on it all? That looks like a TRS-80 accessory. SECOND MONITOR FOR YOUR TRS-DOS SYSTEM :D
I am from Canada and I totally remember an ad for that small Zenith TV so when you first said it might be from Canada I knew it before you even turned the set around. Can't say I've seen one in person though.
The "720K diskette storage" in the Attache ad was for both floppy drives combined. Old computer ads loved to do that, sometimes citing it as " *up to* ____K diskette storage" by including all possible internal and external floppy drives you could attach to the system.
564 is the supplier code for Sanyo, which also bought Sears' Warwick Electronucs (Sivertone) operation at about that time. As for the Zenith picture tube, the black matrix technology gaves a dark background to improve contrast.
We have also bought just 2 TVs from 2001. Both are working every day until today. First is 50cm CRT Philips now moved into the kitchen, second one we bought in 2011 is the 42" Panasonic plasma TV.
The Attaché ad was supposed to be looking out through the window, so the letters were reversed. You may also have missed that it's a 2001 joke. HAL in HAL-9000 was Heuristic ALgorithmic, where here it's Heuristic Automation Laboratories. Fun find!
That mini TV is easily the coolest thing you got in that batch. Mini CRT tv's like that is getting increasingly rare, and you should 3D print some parts for it and restore it to pristine condition just to have something to explain for the grandkids.
Idea: Do a raspberry pi zero mod with this tiny little binoc TV. I think it would fit into the battery compartment. Then you'd have a portable Mini C64 with use of an emulator. 😂
One of the first jobs i had was at an appliance/tv store, and i repaired a few tube based PTP wired sets. The oddest part was the terminal strips which were just jam packed with capacitors and resistors, because where else would you mount them? The interesting thing is those old tube TV's were almost always repaired by replacing whichever tube had blown. I'd pull the cover and look for the filament that wasn't lit up. No adjustments or anything, pull the bad tube, replace it and the TV was repaired.
Adrian, you wondered what to do with a mini-CRT? Back in the late '70s an electronics surplus store by me had 1.5-inch B&W camcorder viewfinders. I bought one and hooked it up to my Apple ][+, it was so cute playing Little Brick-Out on it! I had an idea for mounting two of them together, then creating a dual video card for the Apple, maybe using 6845 CRT terminal controller ICs, and offsetting the graphics enough to create a stereo-optic viewer. Virtual Reality headset in the 1970s! I never followed through on it. I also considered using one to make a working console television set for a dollhouse. 🙂
Yeah, as a kid back in the 90's I had my own small Sony Trinitron TV with a SCART connection and inbuilt VCR. That thing despite its size was built to last, never had any issues despite playing way too much Sega Megadrive and Playstation One on it!
That "Macro Arithmetics Processor" is actually pretty freaking bad-ass for its day! I found an older version on Archive: 15 Million rounded 32bit FLOPS, Coding in ASM or Fortran (it's architected to accelerate Fortran in Hardware), Field upgradable, blah blah. Recommended use was vector processing for Seismic activity, Sonar and Radar, Telemetry, Biomedical, X-Ray, Image Processing, Comms and Speech, !Nuclear Science!, Vibration and Noise Analysis ... and ... Simulation! And that's the older model! I'd love one of these 😀 Edit: The specs given here are from 1976 (my year of birth!) and the machine operates like a co-processor. It needs a host to give it commands and files and so on. RetroBytes did a video recently about "The Transputer: A Parallel Future", This MAP seems similar ... worth a watch! @Adrian I would love to see you play with one of these!!!
Interesting backstory about your family's TV. We started off with a 13 or smaller inch tube B/W TV ... whached several of the western series, my favorites being the wild wild west and high chaparral. 6 million dollar man and others.
That Binoc TV screen looks amazing! It was either an amazing quality build, or had little use --- or both. You've gotta do something fun with this in a future project.
@15:31 my quick trick to know if center positive or negative is just to check with the multimeter if the center pin has conitnuity with the body of the RF antenna connector
Have one of the Attache, our buddy Earl managed to buy out the repair center's stock of parts, they are very hacked together inside with stacks on stacks of bodges. The 2nd CPU option was an 8086 dos compatibility card that slotted in, and could optionally add another serial port and IEEE-488 port. I don't think we ever got any of them booting. I've given up on trying to get mine working and have put off using the case for a cyber deck project. The plastic hinges and latches on the mushy keyboard tend to fall apart, as do the plastics on the carry handle. If I remember correctly the floppy drives were 0.625 height (in between half height and full height).
If you have an 8086 processor with a z80, then it's an 8:16 which is the second model they produced. It actually performed better than other portables at that time because it was truly software compatible.
Back a few years ago I finally got my first Sony Trinitron TV. I found a 19" KV1925R. The set was left outside under a covered porch on the floor. The set had been outside I think few a couple of years and was covered in leaves and junk. Never the less I saved the Sony as it was free so had nothing to lose. I let the TV dry for few days and then took the back off of it to make sure the set was safe to use. I hooked up a VCR and plugged in set and TV worked perfectly with extremely strong Picture tube. The set worked for 3 days then a while watching ALF an electrolytic capacitor shorted right to ground taking the fuse and flyback transformer with it. I managed to find new old stock flyback and recapped the TV. That brought the set back to life. This TV has on screen display and I have the original remote control for the set too.
Seeing those old print ads made me wish I had been able to save all the issues of Computer Shopper I had accumulated through most of the 90s. I never did have a subscription to it but I would end up going to a book store or convenience store where it was sold each month to buy one as a teen! I stopped buying entirely when they downsized it into a regular sized magazine (I LOVED the monster sized issues!) plus I had regular dial-up internet so I could also window shop online for many PC parts.
When Heathkit was part of Zenith they sold that Zenith TV in kit form - I had one, and if I recall correctly, it was mostly just a mechanical assembly operation. All the boards came pre-assembled.
When my parents upgraded their TV, I inherited a monster of a console unit. A Zenith 25" console TV with the wood construction all around, and the neat pull down panel on the right side that had the controls (vert, horz, tint, color, etc). I did have a terrible set of rabbit ears and the vacuum tubes were starting to fail, but you know for someone who was 8 years old at the time in 1983 it was awesome!
We got an RCA XL-100 25" console model in 1975 (no remote) and it lasted until I replaced it with a 27" Sony WEGA in 2008. So, yeah, they were reliable. I don't remember having to do much messing around with the tint or colour. I did have to replace a bridge rectifier in the PS once, but that was it. We had it for 33 years and passed it on to someone else as a donation to a needy family.
19:55 fwiw, we measure screen sizes in inches over here (spain), despite being metric for literally everything else. a TV will show like 56" on the box, then give the width and height in mm.
Hello Adrian, love that machine too !! excellent video and very welcomed sharing and teaching as usual, kisses from France. Stéphane ps : let's hope our French @Retroredrum will make a IIci french version soon
My first IBM compatible computer was a AT&T 6300, it was so awesome. I chopped up the PSU to use it with the 368DX 40 I bought at a computer fair that I had running in the box it came in, I was a poor college student at the time. I wish I still had the AT&T all I have left of it is the 5.25" floppy drive.
As for the RCA tv system, the reason for the modules as they were called, this was to make repair simpler. There were a number of places that did the component level repairs and the field tech would just replace the module. The modules were for things like IF, Audio (sometimes 2 modules with 1 for output power), Horizontal, Vertical, CRT drive, etc. BTW, I remember that one of the bigger names in module repair was PTS and they started in rebuilding tuners.
Quasar had the "Works in a draw" setup where the technician could pull the electronics out and replace various boards in a similar fashion. I remember this from their advertisements in from the 80s.
The ad where someone is forming the leads on a part, that is almost sure to be what's known as a "black beauty" capacitor. These are paper dielectric caps in a plastic shell, and given their age now, they are no better than RIFA caps (but not as smelly when they fail).
The AT&T PC6300 was sold as a terminal to be used with at least the 3B2 computer. We had those at the soil conservation service in the early 90s. I talked about this a bit in a video I did a few years ago.
THat makes for a pretty expensive terminal! We ran a 3B2/700 but went with cheaper Zenith Z49 terminals for the timesharing users, and made the AT&T PCs available for student PC users. (I commented about this separately)
29:44 looking at that photo being flipped I think that's supposed to represent a storefront window which is weird. so it would be correct on the outside of the store but reversed on the inside. But why would you have your desk right next to the store front window and door?
Thank you so much for scanning the Otrona ad, I'm making a big compilation of data about this computer and this one wasn't online yet! Some cool info about this machine: This is an ad for the Attaché 8-16, which was an expanded version of the Attaché with a 8086 card and MS-DOS (poor) compatibility. It used to cost about double the price of its contemporary Kaypro & Osborne, but was lighter and had very cool specs including bitmap graphics. The whole machine is well integrated and extremely well made. From what I can gather, it sold between 5000 and 10k units. The company tried to migrate to PC compatibles with the Otrona 2001 but went bankrupt due to high production costs. There are mentions of Tempest-hardened Attaché computers for govt use, but I have yet to find tangible info about that beyond a few mentions.
I bought a 21 inch Trinitron monitor for my computer in 1999 (not cheap) and I used it well over 10 years without issues... I haven't fired it up a while, but it wouldn't surprise if it still works today.
Sony Trinitron were and even still are such reliable TV's, my brother had a few of them in different sizes over the years and they just always worked, looked good and took bad treatment without issues, he had his 32 inch I believe it was on a tiny little cart for years, when it finally collapsed and hit the hardwood floor, shaking the whole house, we thought for sure when we walked back into the room it would be doa, but no it continued to work perfectly for more years until he finally got a flat screen, which only worked for maybe a year before it failed 😂
I burned-in a ~20" dell trinitron, and wore out a 14" seiko/epson trinitron, but a hand-me-down 17" sony trinitron TV with a broken power switch was scooped up by a neighbor in the early 00s a few minutes after I set it down on my curb with a "free" sign on it. it had been replaced with a toshiba that barely survived into the 10s.
I had one too, and had to get rid of it when I moved out of state in 2013. They’re just so freaking heavy to lug around, and when you have to pay for shipping by weight it seemed like the only option. I had to get rid of 10 or so huge CRT monitors when I moved. Hurts man.
Our first color television was a Heathkit tv and it had a zenith equivalent; the difference was that you did indeed build the Heathkit and it is true that there were no printed circuit boards and we had to assemble the wooden cabinet. It lasted in excess of 20 years with constant use and saw a few video games.
Long after I moved out, we got one of those big rear-projection Sony 720i TVs. Worked really well at the time. I think all the TVs we had growing up were cheapo brands. Probably a B&W Magnavox or something.
@adriansdigitalbasement2 I have two of those Zenith TVs as my grandfather worked for Zenith. There were two main variants. They look almost identical, but one had a radio, and one didn't. I do remember that it does have a rechargeable battery. It was a fairly large square 4inx4inx1in perhaps. My dad kept one on his desk at work (and that one sits on my desk now) and my mom had one in the kitchen.
Our first TV, from before I was born, was a Dumont. It was black and white, of course, and very heavy. We used it as a spare set until around 1969. Our second TV was a Sears. After that, we always had RCA. Now I use Samsung monitors exclusively.
I remember the cute 14/15" portable Sony Trinitrons as a tweenager in the '80s. The most impressive thing to me at the time was not the clunky dials on the USA sets, but the capacitive touch buttons on the UK sets. Despite how cool that was we had it hooked up to a "borrowed" Ferguson Videostar VHS and watched so many great gore and horror movies that would have sent Mary Whitehouse to an earlier grave. That VHS player was a top loader with the "sledge-hammer" buttons. The opposite of sleek and cool like the Trinitron TV's.
so the no printed circuit board/hand wired thing is still a thing in the guitar community. For some of your higher end, "boutique" guitar amps that is a feature or selling point at least and we 1 billion percent still use tube amps. I didn't even bat an eye at that lol.
My former next door neighbor worked for Heathkit, then after the Zenith merger he worked for Zenith Data Systems. He had a "Space Command" TV with a built-in speaker phone. It was a large 25"-27" wood console TV which allowed making and accepting calls through the TV.
If indeed the polarity is correct on the zenith the Zenith requires a 780 milliamp power supply. It may not be able to start if it's only getting 300 milliamps, because it takes a lot of power to get that picture tube running
BINOC: Use it in a homemade portable or laptop vic-20! Use as the face or mouth on a robot. Integrate it with one of your post cards. Add a new 3d printed door.
One method I've heard of for treating boards with leaky caps is to soak them with WD40, the oils are supposed to bind with the electrolytes and form an inert soap-like substance. Seems to work, as a Mac I tried it on went from not having sound, to making the bong after I sprayed it and let it soak for at least a day. If you ever have a large number of boards to process, could give it a try with one of the more-common ones?
I think the main thing about using the vinegar after removing a capacitor is to stop the chemicals from eating the board and other chips. It's not really to clean, actually you should clean the vinegar after you wipe it down.. It's not a cleaner is a neutralizer.
The HAL logo in the computer ad is backwards because it's the inside of a window meant to be viewed and read from outside the building. You can see the "engineer" exiting the door to the store right next to it.
I remember my grandparents had a small TV set very much like that little Trinitron set in the second bedroom us grandkids used. If I recall correctly, the 'standard' color CRT had three gun assemblies mounted in a delta formation. The Trinitron CRT has a single gun assembly with three cathodes and a shared aperture for the three beams.
I bought a widescreen 26 inch Trinitron back in 1996, pre-WEGA... It was in constant use, at least six hours a day for over 22 years before the tube surrendered. I replaced it with a Bravia LCD TV, and I made sure it had a SCART socket to attach my Sony DVD player to, which I bought in 2003, and which is still in perfect working order and in daily use. (Since 2011, I've worn out the lasers on 5 Blu-ray players) "They don't make 'em like they used to" cliche invoked...
What it means by a jet black background is that before that, the CRT's tension mask or tube was light colored. But that removed some color definition and contrast. By using a jet black, the colors were more defined and with more contrast. About color tvs, in those days they used a filter that removed part of the color information. Then some companies developed de Comb Filter. I'm not sure, but it removed some signal noise but preserved the color info. Also, GE developed VIR that helped improve the image. I'm not sure how it worked either. But I remember it won an EMI (or other) award for it. Hope this helps.
That little Binoc TV reminds me of the Sinclair pocket television (the one before he went into computers), being of a similar-ish sort of size, never having seen one in person though I wouldn't know how they'd compare in terms of screen size and whether or not you could watch an episode of Star Trek in any detail... :P
Alright. You've convinced me that it's safe to twist off the capacitors. I've recapped some SE/30 boards and the amount of heat needed to desolder capacitors is kind of ridiculous.
Fun fact about the IBM Proprinter: it was designed to be completely assembled without any tools/screws. The whole case, chassis and other components just clipped together. It was really fast due to using a worm gear to move the head around. Unfortunately this made positioning of the head slight less accurate, so characters were a little "squigly" in draft mode. I still have mine from 1986!
The Sears model numbers are weird. I was a store manager for them for a while. The first 2 numbers before the dash was a division number. So like washer and dryers had the division 26, kitchen appliances had 22, refrigeration was 46. So like a top load washer I remember was 26-26132. If anyone cared lol.
The RCA XL100 were widely considered the best back in the day for picture quality. And yes, the old sets would drift in color. We had a local TV station that would end its programming at 10 PM, play the National Anthem, and then have color bars for ~30 minutes. I became pretty adept at tweaking our set using those bars, and the color would hold (once the set warmed up) for the better part of a week.
You should be able to test for centre positive for checking continuity between the ground on the power connector to some other ground point on the set (like headphones)
That can tell you which side is ground but it doesn't tell you which side is positive or negative. Old equipment mostly used germanium PNP transistors and had a positive ground. If there's a chance the circuitry was designed before the 1970s don't assume ground is negative.
I remember upgrading from a VHS deck connected to a late '80s 21" GE (via RF, yuck!) to a brand new DVD player feeding a 32" JVC D-Series via component. That was back in 2000. What a difference! And technically, I went from a 480i setup to...well, another 480i setup. But it _felt_ like I had stepped into the world of HDTV. I mean, I could suddenly read the credits at the end of a movie!
I had 2 flat screen 21” trinitron crt monitors on my pc back in the day. Made the desk start to bow 🤣. A lot of the viao laptops back then came in for service, high rate of failure of the ram slots.
I fix and screen mod lots of Sega Game Gears, over 200 at this point, so I have extensive experience with the vinegar method. Anyway, might I recommend you use a syringe to, “float”, only the parts of the board that have crusty corrosion with white vinegar. The key is to allow the vinegar to do its magic for 10 to 12 minutes then blot the excess off and use an electric tooth brush, dipped in more vinegar, to further clean the area. Finally, clean the board thoroughly with IPA or wash it to remove any remaining vinegar. After the previous is done you should have a clean board and you will be able to easily see what further repairs/rework need doing if any.
Someone at Otrona must have really been a "2001: A Space Odyssey" fan. From the "HAL" easter egg in the Attache advertisement, to the fact that their next model was called the "2001".
That binoc tv looks really cool. Just love old school Japanese tech. 9 out of 10 times they designed their circuitry to last, which is way better than todays tech thats made to die just outside of warranty.
Some modern OLED tvs use the same black background between pixels for deeper blacks. Each phosphor pixel has a relatively slow decay time and in fast moving scenes never have time to fall to complete black. Putting the black between the pixels adds much higher contrast. Static scenes will have deeper blacks as well. We had a similar TV when I was much younger.
I used to work for Sony, so naturally I bought their TV's over the years and I can happily say, they are all still working fine 40 years later. Can't imagine in another 40 years you could say the same about stuff bought today, but that's progress. 😛
I had a 50 year old radio that never had a tube failure, Was originally in fancy cabinet, but my mother took the cabinet for storage. Had plenty of cooling as the guts were on a table!
You can get that little TV back to picking up transmissions again via a digital converter box. Just take the center pin from the out on the box and wrap a wire around the antenna. I did something similar with a small black and white TV like that one you have. Also make sure there's no batteries in it. Mine had them and they prevented the thing from turning on while plugged in.
Ok, I have to ask. The photo of your Sony 27" TV from 2001 seems to be showing a Aussie V8 Supercar race..??? I only ask because I recognise the cars (they were heavily modified Holden Commodores). Was a fan of that race series back then :D
Wait a second: Early Triniton used an optical beam splitter for the 3 primary colours but only one electron emitter. Sort of a prismatic solution. However: they faced a lot problems which came along with the thin wire stripe-mask (vibrations, odd miscoloring, visible stabilizer wires) in addition to a way more bulky and heavy tube itself. The picture was outstanding when everything works. The wires of that stripe mask leave more electrons through for activating the phosphoros pixels and pictures were clearer and brighter. Hopefully.
I don't bother with broadcast tv anymore but I have a collection of old movies on DVD and, yes, VHS. I watch them on my Sony CRT set and really enjoy its clarity and brightness. And if you'll excuse me now, I'm settling down with a cup of tea and an episode of Columbo.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
I had that Zenith TV when I was a kid. Used it on cross country road trips. Loved tuning in various channels throughout the trip for 20 minutes at a time until we were out of range.
I love all those old magazines. I could read them all day.
I think the backwards lettering is supposed to show affluence. His office is important enough to have a window in it. Subtle psychological adman game.
It's got people taking a second look even to this day.
Yes, that was supposed to be a backwards-printed sign on the front window of a lab, so people looking in from outside could read it.
It also said Heuristic Algorithm Lab...HAL.
"Open the office door, HAL."
"I'M SORRY, DAVE. I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT. "
Indeed, and I think is also for not confusing the sign with the real brand of the ad.
Not quite sure about your interpretation, but I believe that picture is supposed to resemble a storefront or agency, which is shown from the inside-out... Probably not much more to that.
The Sears Binoc/ Sanyo TPM 2570G apparently came with a pretty cool "binocular" case.
As someone who is a bird watcher for a hobby, it really looks quite a lot like a binocular bag in size, shape, and even a little strap to carry it. Pretty neat.
It looks like some kind of Star Wars thing, not quite like the binoculars Luke uses but in that neighbourhood.
Meanwhile the other, larger set that doesn't power on it all? That looks like a TRS-80 accessory. SECOND MONITOR FOR YOUR TRS-DOS SYSTEM :D
UK viewer here, I think you have such a calming easy going accent that I'm happy to listen to all day. Keep up the good work.
I am from Canada and I totally remember an ad for that small Zenith TV so when you first said it might be from Canada I knew it before you even turned the set around. Can't say I've seen one in person though.
The "720K diskette storage" in the Attache ad was for both floppy drives combined. Old computer ads loved to do that, sometimes citing it as " *up to* ____K diskette storage" by including all possible internal and external floppy drives you could attach to the system.
Haha, how sneaky. No, not 80 track disks but two 40 track drives!
Yes I thought those 720K in that era in Z80 CPM are a bit suspicious, but this explains it. 😅
564 is the supplier code for Sanyo, which also bought Sears' Warwick Electronucs (Sivertone) operation at about that time. As for the Zenith picture tube, the black matrix technology gaves a dark background to improve contrast.
We have also bought just 2 TVs from 2001. Both are working every day until today. First is 50cm CRT Philips now moved into the kitchen, second one we bought in 2011 is the 42" Panasonic plasma TV.
The Attaché ad was supposed to be looking out through the window, so the letters were reversed. You may also have missed that it's a 2001 joke. HAL in HAL-9000 was Heuristic ALgorithmic, where here it's Heuristic Automation Laboratories. Fun find!
I had one of those Zenith TV long ago.. I live in Quebec, canada. It served we well during the icestorm when most of Quebec went dark in 1998.
31:28 Growing up we had an IBM Proprinter XL24. I recognised the button panel in the advert immediately.
Love the Binoc! I just bought one! I hope you can do a composite mod video with it and give it a tune up. I'll follow along and do the same on my end.
That mini TV is easily the coolest thing you got in that batch. Mini CRT tv's like that is getting increasingly rare, and you should 3D print some parts for it and restore it to pristine condition just to have something to explain for the grandkids.
You mean Adrian is straight?
You know that gay people can also have children, right? Also what has that got to do with anything.@@hypnotised-clover
@@nickblackburn1903 Cry some more.
Idea: Do a raspberry pi zero mod with this tiny little binoc TV. I think it would fit into the battery compartment. Then you'd have a portable Mini C64 with use of an emulator. 😂
One of the first jobs i had was at an appliance/tv store, and i repaired a few tube based PTP wired sets. The oddest part was the terminal strips which were just jam packed with capacitors and resistors, because where else would you mount them?
The interesting thing is those old tube TV's were almost always repaired by replacing whichever tube had blown. I'd pull the cover and look for the filament that wasn't lit up. No adjustments or anything, pull the bad tube, replace it and the TV was repaired.
Adrian, you wondered what to do with a mini-CRT? Back in the late '70s an electronics surplus store by me had 1.5-inch B&W camcorder viewfinders. I bought one and hooked it up to my Apple ][+, it was so cute playing Little Brick-Out on it! I had an idea for mounting two of them together, then creating a dual video card for the Apple, maybe using 6845 CRT terminal controller ICs, and offsetting the graphics enough to create a stereo-optic viewer. Virtual Reality headset in the 1970s! I never followed through on it.
I also considered using one to make a working console television set for a dollhouse. 🙂
Yeah, as a kid back in the 90's I had my own small Sony Trinitron TV with a SCART connection and inbuilt VCR. That thing despite its size was built to last, never had any issues despite playing way too much Sega Megadrive and Playstation One on it!
I have one, still work perfectly.
You missed something on the ad you showed at 29:40 - look what it actually says on the Window. A little Easter-egg there. :)
That "Macro Arithmetics Processor" is actually pretty freaking bad-ass for its day!
I found an older version on Archive: 15 Million rounded 32bit FLOPS, Coding in ASM or Fortran (it's architected to accelerate Fortran in Hardware), Field upgradable, blah blah.
Recommended use was vector processing for Seismic activity, Sonar and Radar, Telemetry, Biomedical, X-Ray, Image Processing, Comms and Speech, !Nuclear Science!, Vibration and Noise Analysis ... and ... Simulation!
And that's the older model! I'd love one of these 😀
Edit: The specs given here are from 1976 (my year of birth!) and the machine operates like a co-processor. It needs a host to give it commands and files and so on.
RetroBytes did a video recently about "The Transputer: A Parallel Future", This MAP seems similar ... worth a watch!
@Adrian I would love to see you play with one of these!!!
That Binoc is gorgeous. ❤
That Motorola ad is from 1950! That's awesome.
Interesting backstory about your family's TV. We started off with a 13 or smaller inch tube B/W TV ... whached several of the western series, my favorites being the wild wild west and high chaparral. 6 million dollar man and others.
That Binoc TV screen looks amazing! It was either an amazing quality build, or had little use --- or both. You've gotta do something fun with this in a future project.
@15:31 my quick trick to know if center positive or negative is just to check with the multimeter if the center pin has conitnuity with the body of the RF antenna connector
Have one of the Attache, our buddy Earl managed to buy out the repair center's stock of parts, they are very hacked together inside with stacks on stacks of bodges. The 2nd CPU option was an 8086 dos compatibility card that slotted in, and could optionally add another serial port and IEEE-488 port. I don't think we ever got any of them booting. I've given up on trying to get mine working and have put off using the case for a cyber deck project. The plastic hinges and latches on the mushy keyboard tend to fall apart, as do the plastics on the carry handle. If I remember correctly the floppy drives were 0.625 height (in between half height and full height).
If you have an 8086 processor with a z80, then it's an 8:16 which is the second model they produced. It actually performed better than other portables at that time because it was truly software compatible.
Back a few years ago I finally got my first Sony Trinitron TV. I found a 19" KV1925R. The set was left outside under a covered porch on the floor. The set had been outside I think few a couple of years and was covered in leaves and junk. Never the less I saved the Sony as it was free so had nothing to lose. I let the TV dry for few days and then took the back off of it to make sure the set was safe to use. I hooked up a VCR and plugged in set and TV worked perfectly with extremely strong Picture tube. The set worked for 3 days then a while watching ALF an electrolytic capacitor shorted right to ground taking the fuse and flyback transformer with it. I managed to find new old stock flyback and recapped the TV. That brought the set back to life. This TV has on screen display and I have the original remote control for the set too.
Seeing those old print ads made me wish I had been able to save all the issues of Computer Shopper I had accumulated through most of the 90s. I never did have a subscription to it but I would end up going to a book store or convenience store where it was sold each month to buy one as a teen! I stopped buying entirely when they downsized it into a regular sized magazine (I LOVED the monster sized issues!) plus I had regular dial-up internet so I could also window shop online for many PC parts.
When Heathkit was part of Zenith they sold that Zenith TV in kit form - I had one, and if I recall correctly, it was mostly just a mechanical assembly operation. All the boards came pre-assembled.
When my parents upgraded their TV, I inherited a monster of a console unit. A Zenith 25" console TV with the wood construction all around, and the neat pull down panel on the right side that had the controls (vert, horz, tint, color, etc). I did have a terrible set of rabbit ears and the vacuum tubes were starting to fail, but you know for someone who was 8 years old at the time in 1983 it was awesome!
The Binoc looks like the "binoc" used by Han and Luke on Hoth. TESB also came out in 1980.
We got an RCA XL-100 25" console model in 1975 (no remote) and it lasted until I replaced it with a 27" Sony WEGA in 2008. So, yeah, they were reliable. I don't remember having to do much messing around with the tint or colour. I did have to replace a bridge rectifier in the PS once, but that was it. We had it for 33 years and passed it on to someone else as a donation to a needy family.
19:55 fwiw, we measure screen sizes in inches over here (spain), despite being metric for literally everything else. a TV will show like 56" on the box, then give the width and height in mm.
Hello Adrian, love that machine too !! excellent video and very welcomed sharing and teaching as usual, kisses from France. Stéphane ps : let's hope our French @Retroredrum will make a IIci french version soon
Please, videos modding those tv sets asap!
My first IBM compatible computer was a AT&T 6300, it was so awesome. I chopped up the PSU to use it with the 368DX 40 I bought at a computer fair that I had running in the box it came in, I was a poor college student at the time. I wish I still had the AT&T all I have left of it is the 5.25" floppy drive.
Never thought I'd see Australian V8 touring cars making a brief cameo on this channel!
As for the RCA tv system, the reason for the modules as they were called, this was to make repair simpler. There were a number of places that did the component level repairs and the field tech would just replace the module. The modules were for things like IF, Audio (sometimes 2 modules with 1 for output power), Horizontal, Vertical, CRT drive, etc. BTW, I remember that one of the bigger names in module repair was PTS and they started in rebuilding tuners.
Quasar had the "Works in a draw" setup where the technician could pull the electronics out and replace various boards in a similar fashion. I remember this from their advertisements in from the 80s.
Quick google of that Motorola ad found the same set in an ad from 1950 for sale on eBay. That ad might be older than you think!
Hey Adrian, the radio museum says that Motorola model 17F4 is from 1951.
The ad where someone is forming the leads on a part, that is almost sure to be what's known as a "black beauty" capacitor. These are paper dielectric caps in a plastic shell, and given their age now, they are no better than RIFA caps (but not as smelly when they fail).
The AT&T PC6300 was sold as a terminal to be used with at least the 3B2 computer. We had those at the soil conservation service in the early 90s. I talked about this a bit in a video I did a few years ago.
THat makes for a pretty expensive terminal! We ran a 3B2/700 but went with cheaper Zenith Z49 terminals for the timesharing users, and made the AT&T PCs available for student PC users. (I commented about this separately)
@@DrDavesDiversions Ah! But it was a bargain! It was a terminal and a fully functioning DOS PC! 🤣
@@TalesofWeirdStuff Agreed, LOL. :)
Dude cool channel, glad you mentioned your video!
29:44 looking at that photo being flipped I think that's supposed to represent a storefront window which is weird. so it would be correct on the outside of the store but reversed on the inside. But why would you have your desk right next to the store front window and door?
Thank you so much for scanning the Otrona ad, I'm making a big compilation of data about this computer and this one wasn't online yet!
Some cool info about this machine: This is an ad for the Attaché 8-16, which was an expanded version of the Attaché with a 8086 card and MS-DOS (poor) compatibility. It used to cost about double the price of its contemporary Kaypro & Osborne, but was lighter and had very cool specs including bitmap graphics.
The whole machine is well integrated and extremely well made.
From what I can gather, it sold between 5000 and 10k units. The company tried to migrate to PC compatibles with the Otrona 2001 but went bankrupt due to high production costs.
There are mentions of Tempest-hardened Attaché computers for govt use, but I have yet to find tangible info about that beyond a few mentions.
17:47 I am very interested in a tutorial for how to add a composite input to a small CRT television! 📺
I bought a 21 inch Trinitron monitor for my computer in 1999 (not cheap) and I used it well over 10 years without issues... I haven't fired it up a while, but it wouldn't surprise if it still works today.
And I watched this video on a 24" FD trinitron. HP A7217A. Other than needing frequent manual degaussing, still works great!
Sony Trinitron were and even still are such reliable TV's, my brother had a few of them in different sizes over the years and they just always worked, looked good and took bad treatment without issues, he had his 32 inch I believe it was on a tiny little cart for years, when it finally collapsed and hit the hardwood floor, shaking the whole house, we thought for sure when we walked back into the room it would be doa, but no it continued to work perfectly for more years until he finally got a flat screen, which only worked for maybe a year before it failed 😂
I burned-in a ~20" dell trinitron, and wore out a 14" seiko/epson trinitron, but a hand-me-down 17" sony trinitron TV with a broken power switch was scooped up by a neighbor in the early 00s a few minutes after I set it down on my curb with a "free" sign on it. it had been replaced with a toshiba that barely survived into the 10s.
I had one too, and had to get rid of it when I moved out of state in 2013. They’re just so freaking heavy to lug around, and when you have to pay for shipping by weight it seemed like the only option. I had to get rid of 10 or so huge CRT monitors when I moved. Hurts man.
always super enjoyable !!!!! Thank you for being you !!!!!
Our first color television was a Heathkit tv and it had a zenith equivalent; the difference was that you did indeed build the Heathkit and it is true that there were no printed circuit boards and we had to assemble the wooden cabinet. It lasted in excess of 20 years with constant use and saw a few video games.
Long after I moved out, we got one of those big rear-projection Sony 720i TVs. Worked really well at the time. I think all the TVs we had growing up were cheapo brands. Probably a B&W Magnavox or something.
@adriansdigitalbasement2 I have two of those Zenith TVs as my grandfather worked for Zenith. There were two main variants. They look almost identical, but one had a radio, and one didn't. I do remember that it does have a rechargeable battery. It was a fairly large square 4inx4inx1in perhaps. My dad kept one on his desk at work (and that one sits on my desk now) and my mom had one in the kitchen.
It could also be that there was a lens to make the tiny picture a bit bigger. 😊
Our first TV, from before I was born, was a Dumont. It was black and white, of course, and very heavy. We used it as a spare set until around 1969. Our second TV was a Sears. After that, we always had RCA. Now I use Samsung monitors exclusively.
I remember the cute 14/15" portable Sony Trinitrons as a tweenager in the '80s. The most impressive thing to me at the time was not the clunky dials on the USA sets, but the capacitive touch buttons on the UK sets. Despite how cool that was we had it hooked up to a "borrowed" Ferguson Videostar VHS and watched so many great gore and horror movies that would have sent Mary Whitehouse to an earlier grave. That VHS player was a top loader with the "sledge-hammer" buttons. The opposite of sleek and cool like the Trinitron TV's.
Had a tube color set in late 60s and it had no tint problems. You could hear the switching frequency at 17 KHz if you had young ears!
so the no printed circuit board/hand wired thing is still a thing in the guitar community. For some of your higher end, "boutique" guitar amps that is a feature or selling point at least and we 1 billion percent still use tube amps. I didn't even bat an eye at that lol.
Hi from another Pennsylvania fan!!
40:44 dreamy productive setup there!!!
The writing at 29:36 is the office window so that’s why it appears flipped.
HAL - Heuristic Automation Library
My former next door neighbor worked for Heathkit, then after the Zenith merger he worked for Zenith Data Systems. He had a "Space Command" TV with a built-in speaker phone. It was a large 25"-27" wood console TV which allowed making and accepting calls through the TV.
That small guy makes me feel sooo goood :D So cute!
If indeed the polarity is correct on the zenith the Zenith requires a 780 milliamp power supply. It may not be able to start if it's only getting 300 milliamps, because it takes a lot of power to get that picture tube running
BINOC:
Use it in a homemade portable or laptop vic-20!
Use as the face or mouth on a robot.
Integrate it with one of your post cards.
Add a new 3d printed door.
One method I've heard of for treating boards with leaky caps is to soak them with WD40, the oils are supposed to bind with the electrolytes and form an inert soap-like substance.
Seems to work, as a Mac I tried it on went from not having sound, to making the bong after I sprayed it and let it soak for at least a day.
If you ever have a large number of boards to process, could give it a try with one of the more-common ones?
Great Video Adrian!
I love your mail call videos!
I can CAD up a replacement cover for the Sanyo TPM if you like?
How did you miss the 2001 HAL reference in the Otrana Attache ad?! 😉
The backwards text in the window.
I think the main thing about using the vinegar after removing a capacitor is to stop the chemicals from eating the board and other chips. It's not really to clean, actually you should clean the vinegar after you wipe it down.. It's not a cleaner is a neutralizer.
9V Center negative is common for guitar effect pedals.
The HAL logo in the computer ad is backwards because it's the inside of a window meant to be viewed and read from outside the building. You can see the "engineer" exiting the door to the store right next to it.
I remember my grandparents had a small TV set very much like that little Trinitron set in the second bedroom us grandkids used. If I recall correctly, the 'standard' color CRT had three gun assemblies mounted in a delta formation. The Trinitron CRT has a single gun assembly with three cathodes and a shared aperture for the three beams.
I bought a widescreen 26 inch Trinitron back in 1996, pre-WEGA... It was in constant use, at least six hours a day for over 22 years before the tube surrendered. I replaced it with a Bravia LCD TV, and I made sure it had a SCART socket to attach my Sony DVD player to, which I bought in 2003, and which is still in perfect working order and in daily use. (Since 2011, I've worn out the lasers on 5 Blu-ray players) "They don't make 'em like they used to" cliche invoked...
What it means by a jet black background is that before that, the CRT's tension mask or tube was light colored. But that removed some color definition and contrast. By using a jet black, the colors were more defined and with more contrast.
About color tvs, in those days they used a filter that removed part of the color information. Then some companies developed de Comb Filter. I'm not sure, but it removed some signal noise but preserved the color info.
Also, GE developed VIR that helped improve the image. I'm not sure how it worked either. But I remember it won an EMI (or other) award for it.
Hope this helps.
What ever happened to Rammy and the Dead Parts Box? Just realized I hadn't seen them in a while!
That little Binoc TV reminds me of the Sinclair pocket television (the one before he went into computers), being of a similar-ish sort of size, never having seen one in person though I wouldn't know how they'd compare in terms of screen size and whether or not you could watch an episode of Star Trek in any detail... :P
Alright. You've convinced me that it's safe to twist off the capacitors. I've recapped some SE/30 boards and the amount of heat needed to desolder capacitors is kind of ridiculous.
Fun fact about the IBM Proprinter: it was designed to be completely assembled without any tools/screws. The whole case, chassis and other components just clipped together. It was really fast due to using a worm gear to move the head around. Unfortunately this made positioning of the head slight less accurate, so characters were a little "squigly" in draft mode. I still have mine from 1986!
The Sears model numbers are weird. I was a store manager for them for a while. The first 2 numbers before the dash was a division number. So like washer and dryers had the division 26, kitchen appliances had 22, refrigeration was 46. So like a top load washer I remember was 26-26132. If anyone cared lol.
you are correct. to pick nits, the format was 26.26132 (worked for Sears in college)
Lets see the Binoc with 80 columns.
The RCA XL100 were widely considered the best back in the day for picture quality.
And yes, the old sets would drift in color. We had a local TV station that would end its programming at 10 PM, play the National Anthem, and then have color bars for ~30 minutes. I became pretty adept at tweaking our set using those bars, and the color would hold (once the set warmed up) for the better part of a week.
adrian: check out that wood grain
*LGR entered the chat
You should be able to test for centre positive for checking continuity between the ground on the power connector to some other ground point on the set (like headphones)
That can tell you which side is ground but it doesn't tell you which side is positive or negative. Old equipment mostly used germanium PNP transistors and had a positive ground. If there's a chance the circuitry was designed before the 1970s don't assume ground is negative.
its amazing they could make a crt screen that small
I remember upgrading from a VHS deck connected to a late '80s 21" GE (via RF, yuck!) to a brand new DVD player feeding a 32" JVC D-Series via component. That was back in 2000. What a difference! And technically, I went from a 480i setup to...well, another 480i setup. But it _felt_ like I had stepped into the world of HDTV. I mean, I could suddenly read the credits at the end of a movie!
I had 2 flat screen 21” trinitron crt monitors on my pc back in the day. Made the desk start to bow 🤣. A lot of the viao laptops back then came in for service, high rate of failure of the ram slots.
I fix and screen mod lots of Sega Game Gears, over 200 at this point, so I have extensive experience with the vinegar method. Anyway, might I recommend you use a syringe to, “float”, only the parts of the board that have crusty corrosion with white vinegar. The key is to allow the vinegar to do its magic for 10 to 12 minutes then blot the excess off and use an electric tooth brush, dipped in more vinegar, to further clean the area. Finally, clean the board thoroughly with IPA or wash it to remove any remaining vinegar. After the previous is done you should have a clean board and you will be able to easily see what further repairs/rework need doing if any.
Someone at Otrona must have really been a "2001: A Space Odyssey" fan. From the "HAL" easter egg in the Attache advertisement, to the fact that their next model was called the "2001".
Adrian your basement looks bigger than my house
That binoc tv looks really cool. Just love old school Japanese tech. 9 out of 10 times they designed their circuitry to last, which is way better than todays tech thats made to die just outside of warranty.
Some modern OLED tvs use the same black background between pixels for deeper blacks. Each phosphor pixel has a relatively slow decay time and in fast moving scenes never have time to fall to complete black. Putting the black between the pixels adds much higher contrast. Static scenes will have deeper blacks as well. We had a similar TV when I was much younger.
I'm guessing the text in the Attache ad is mirrored because that is supposed to be a window that is displaying that text to the outside.
42:18 I see that the TV has a "Bilt-in-Antenna" (sic).
Can't wait to see a composite mod on the Binoc!
I used to work for Sony, so naturally I bought their TV's over the years and I can happily say, they are all still working fine 40 years later. Can't imagine in another 40 years you could say the same about stuff bought today, but that's progress. 😛
I had a 50 year old radio that never had a tube failure, Was originally in fancy cabinet, but my mother took the cabinet for storage. Had plenty of cooling as the guts were on a table!
You can get that little TV back to picking up transmissions again via a digital converter box. Just take the center pin from the out on the box and wrap a wire around the antenna. I did something similar with a small black and white TV like that one you have. Also make sure there's no batteries in it. Mine had them and they prevented the thing from turning on while plugged in.
"A mere 18lbs. and just a half cubic foot" :D
Ok, I have to ask. The photo of your Sony 27" TV from 2001 seems to be showing a Aussie V8 Supercar race..??? I only ask because I recognise the cars (they were heavily modified Holden Commodores). Was a fan of that race series back then :D
Wait a second: Early Triniton used an optical beam splitter for the 3 primary colours but only one electron emitter. Sort of a prismatic solution. However: they faced a lot problems which came along with the thin wire stripe-mask (vibrations, odd miscoloring, visible stabilizer wires) in addition to a way more bulky and heavy tube itself. The picture was outstanding when everything works. The wires of that stripe mask leave more electrons through for activating the phosphoros pixels and pictures were clearer and brighter. Hopefully.
I don't bother with broadcast tv anymore but I have a collection of old movies on DVD and, yes, VHS. I watch them on my Sony CRT set and really enjoy its clarity and brightness. And if you'll excuse me now, I'm settling down with a cup of tea and an episode of Columbo.